Minister's office says revised tender will 'ensure review is done properly'
Aug 9, 2012 9:47

The Public Works secretariat now tasked with reporting back on its review of the costs associated with the federal government's planned F-35 fighter jet purchase missed its June deadline. Now a revised tender for audit services appears to further delay its work. (Lockheed Martin handout)

Humanity Should Not Live Under Nuclear Threat

For years now, the major producers of weapons and oil, both essential to the world’s “great powers”, have been seeking a confrontation with Iran, just as they did years before with Iraq, resorting to falsehoods and bogus arguments. It is no coincidence that Iran’s oil reserves are as large as and possibly even larger than those of Saudi Arabia.

ington Puts Its Money on Proxy War

The Election Year Outsourcing that No One’s Talking About

Nick Turse - In the 1980s, the U.S. government began funneling aid to mujahedeen rebels in Afghanistan as part of an American proxy war against the Soviet Union. It was, in the minds of America’s Cold War leaders, a rare chance to bloody the Soviets, to give them a taste of the sort of defeat the Vietnamese, with Soviet help, had inflicted on Washington the decade before. In 1989, after years of bloody combat, the Red Army did indeed limp out of Afghanistan in defeat. Since late 2001, the United States has been fighting its former Afghan proxies and their progeny. Now, after years of bloody combat, it’s the U.S. that’s looking to withdraw the bulk of its forces and once again employ proxies to secure its interests there.

http://www.tomdispatch.<WBR>com/blog/175580/

Neocons vs. the ‘Arab Spring’: Back on the Warpath

Ramzy Baroud - The neoconservatives are back with a vengeance. While popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and other Arab countries had briefly rendered them irrelevant in the region, Western intervention in Libya signaled a new opportunity. Now Syria promises to usher a full return of neoconservatives into the Middle East fray.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

August 6, 2012. Six hundred membersof the Order of Canada have signed an appeal to the government of Canada tojoin in an international effort to eliminate nuclear weapons, Murray Thomson,coordinator of the project, announced today.

 Noam Chomsky:  In Hiroshima's Shadow

Noam Chomsky, Nation of Change, Aug. 3 2012

http://tinyurl.com/cbf3r94

Aug. 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.

American White Phosphorus Shells in Libya: A Challenge to a Pentagon Chestnut

C. J. CHIVERS and JOHN ISMAY - August 1, 2012, The New York Times - Logo of the a precursor to the U.S. Agency for International Development on ammunition packaging found by The New York Times in Libya, pointing to the period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the United States helped create and arm the military that overthrew King Idris.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/american-white-phosphorous-shells-in-libya-a-challenge-to-a-pentagon-chestnut/?smid=re-share

UN fails to agree on arms trade treaty; US blamed

Zeenews Bureau

New York: The United Nations member states on Friday failed to reach a treaty cracking down on the global, USD 60 billion business of illicit trading in small arms.

The move was aimed at curbing violence in some of the most troubled corners of the world.

Mission Failure: Afghanistan 
A Message Written in Blood That No One Wants to Hear
By Tom Engelhardt http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175576/

Imagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn’t it? James Holmes times 21? It would dominate the news. We would certainly be consulting experts, trying to make sense of the pattern, groping for explanations. And what if the same thing had also happened almost once every two weeks in 2011? Imagine the shock, imagine the reaction here.

Govts Boost Nukes While Cutting Aid, Social Services
By Haider RizviReprint|

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 27 2012 (IPS) - As U.N.-led talks on disarmament resume in Geneva Monday, calls are growing for nuclear-armed nations to cut spending on their stockpiles and instead divert resources to development.

Minuteman III test launch, 1994. The United States accounts for three-fifths of global spending on nuclear stockpiles. Credit: U.S. Department of Defence/public domain

“The amount still being spent on nuclear arms makes no sense, just as continued reliance on the weapons themselves makes no sense,” David Kreiger, president of the U.S.-based Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, told IPS.

Putin's Geopolitical Chess Game with Washington inSyria and Eurasia

 F. William Engdahl Global Research, July 23, 2012 - Since reassuming his post as Russia's President, Vladimir Putin has lost no minute in addressing the most urgent geopolitical threats to Russia internationally. Not surprisingly, at the center of his agendais the explosive situation in the Middle East, above all Syria. HerePutin is engaging every imaginable means of preventing a furtherdeterioration of the situation into what easily could become another"world war by miscalculation." His activities in recent weeksinvolve active personal diplomacy with Syria's government as well asthe so-called opposition "Syrian National Council." Itinvolves intense diplomacy with Erdogan's Turkey regime. It involvesclosed door diplomacy with Obama. It involves direct diplomacy withIsrael's Benjamin Netanyahu.

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32019